ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows how the Winesburg Eagle and its reporter function to bring together its readers in a local community, Winesburg, Ohio, while the text of Winesburg, Ohio acts in the way that Benedict Anderson describes and brings together its readers in imagining a national community. Ultimately, the newspaper’s functions in Winesburg show that industrialization and the growth of a mass-market do not erase the idea of community; rather, they call attention to lack of a community and the need to consider new ways of imagining how communities are defined. As Benedict Anderson argues and Sherwood Anderson demonstrates, communities larger than a small group, and particularly the large, modern nation-state, can be imagined into existence and made more authentic through the existence of print media. By appearing as both a local reporter and storyteller and as a figure within a larger, national media system, George mediates between these conceptions of embodied small communities and abstract national communities.
